The Aim of Writing
By Brian Crawford
The following conversation occurs regularly when students are working on writing assignments–essays especially:
Student: Is it okay if I [do such-and-such with a quote, write in second person, spread my thesis statement over three sentences, begin with a rhetorical question, and so on]?
Me: That depends. What is your goal?
Over the past few years, I have taught writing more and more through the lens of, “What is your goal?” When I was a student–high school, college, grad school–no teacher or professor ever told my class or me why we wrote essays (as far as I can remember). We just did, because, well, that’s what you were supposed to do. But recently I’ve done quite a bit of reading in psychology, and one thing a number of psychologists have noted is that, when you know why you are doing something, the steps along the way become meaningful. Not only do you understand why you are striving, you know better how to adjust your aim because you know what your target is. And you know when you’ve hit the target, and when you’ve missed.
For these reasons, I now begin writing instruction with the opening question: Why are we writing in the first place? Some of the answers that I get when I ask students this question are perfectly understandable:
To get a good grade.
To communicate.
Because we need to know how to write.
When it comes to writing essays and why we write them, I always draw students’ attention to the word’s etymology: “essayer” (French), meaning, “to try (out).” To try out what? In this case, an idea. We get the term from Renaissance thinker Michel de Montagne, who, in his Essais, tries out hundreds of ideas from all angles–explaining them, testing them, supporting them, contradicting them…
The first goal of an essay is, therefore, to think. To think about your idea and try it out. To figure out what you think and why you think it.
The next goal: To communicate your ideas to someone who is not you (as students note). “Communicate” comes from the Latin, “communicare,” “to make common.” In other words, you are sharing with your reader something that you have figured out–or, in terms of classical style, to get your reader to see what you see. Why “someone who is not you”? Because empathetically focusing on your reader forces you, the author, to confront the curse of knowledge and fill in gaps that may exist in the reader’s mind that no longer exist in your mind (in his book The Sense of Style, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker notes that the curse of knowledge is precisely one of the greatest threats to effective writing). When you read your own writing, your mind fills in the gaps left by your explanation, and you may not even realize that your brain is doing this. But the gaps remain in your reader’s mind. The result? Confusion and non-sharing of your idea. You have failed to communicare, and what should be shared is retained. As I repeat to my students: What feels like overexplaining to you does not for your reader.
What I have observed is this: The most effective “Why?” to writing an essay is the goal of: “By golly, I want you to see what I see–to understand what I understand.” This approach forces a writer to fully and clearly explain every step along the path that led them to their idea. It is for this reason that two of the most impactful essays I have read in my career (and I remember them well) came from students who hated the book they were writing about. What did the students want me to see? That I should never teach those books again. This topic was important to the students, and they wanted to make sure that I saw what they wanted them to see. Their goal was not a grade; it was, sincerely, to communicare.
To help my students remember some key aspects of the why (and also, the how) of writing, I recently created a bookmark that I gave to every student at The Downtown School as a resource. Are these the only steps to writing successfully? Most certainly not. But these are the steps that I have observed hundreds (if not thousands) of times in the approach to writing by students who have experienced success in crafting essays.
And for those students whose main goal is to get a good grade, what I have explained (and observed) is this: If you aim for the right thing and explain every step of your thinking with the most concrete language possible, the grade will usually be the by-product of aiming for the bullseye. You will have hit the mark.